Individuals that are attempting to park their vehicle in a parking lot often have to search for an unoccupied parking space. In a large public parking lot without preassigned parking spaces, such a search is time consuming, harmful to the ecology, and often frustrating.
As a result, a need exists for an automated system that determines the availability of parking lots in the parking lot and displays them in a manner visible to the driver. Systems developed to date require sensors (i.e., ultrasonic, mechanical, inductive, and optical) to be distributed throughout the parking lot with respect to every parking space. These sensors have to be removed and reinstalled each time major parking lot maintenance or renovation is undertaken.
Typically, the vehicles in a parking lot are of a large variety of models and sizes. The vehicles are randomly parked in given parking spaces and the correlation between given vehicles and given parking spaces changes regularly. Further, It is not uncommon for other objects, such as, but not limited to, for example, construction equipment and/or supplies, dumpsters, snow plowed into a heap, and delivery crates to be located in a location normally reserved for a vehicle. Moreover, the images of all parking spaces change as a function of light condition within a 24 hour cycle and from one day to the next. Changes in weather conditions, such as wet pavement or snow cover, will further complicate the occupancy determination and decrease the reliability of such a system.